Plead to Devs - Make the Shield Great

There is nothing that defines the Bulwark more than the shield, yet 90% of the time it is underpowered and underused in melee combat. Both bashing and passive blocking feel really underwhelming.

 Problems

1.  Bash does not flow well with combinations, none of the weapon melee combinations use the shield. No one uses bash in combat.
2.  Bash does not block while animating, you will eat the damage of everything in front of you mid animation before you even stagger or damage them.
3.  Bash does not do good base damage, nor does it scale with difficulty. It takes 4-5 bashes to kill a Gaunt, even more to kill Majoris.
4. Most of the Perks that do buff shield bash, do only one thing. Every other perk is way better option than taking bash perks.
5. We have perks that involve blocking range attacks, but no way of taunting range enemies to attack us, bashing does nothing when it could taunt.
6.  We only have one Prestige Perk that involves blocking range attacks, yet no way of actually taunting range attackers.

Suggestions

1. Make Shield Bash act like parry and have a parry window.
2. Trigger some class perks via shield bash. ie: Intimidating Aura, Defensive Advantage, Defensive Mastery.
3. Scale shield bash damage with difficulty.
4. Allow combinations to flow into and out of a shield bash.
5. Let us plow through minoris when our shield is up. Just like in WWZ.

You guys did the shield better in WWZ, we could do so much things with the shield in WWZ. Please, please, please make it so in SM2.